A Burning Sense of Place

"Smoke Reliquary," Wendy Kowynia, 2025.

For the past year, weaver Wendy Kowynia has been thinking about the concept of place and how it inspires local artists. Sometimes, she points out, it’s obvious. “Landscape artists paint landscapes,” she says, “but my work is more abstract and the links aren’t as obvious.”

In her latest project though, she found a way to weave in a sense of place. The place? An area of the Zirkel Wilderness that burned over 20 years ago.

Wendy had hiked through the area many times, but always on her way to somewhere else (“We've got to get to the end of the trail!” she says. “It’s such a Steamboat thing!”). Two summers ago, instead of passing though, she decided to go up, move around, sit down and observe the place that intrigued her.

“I was struck by its beauty and resilience,” Wendy says. In trying to figure out why that specific area spoke to her, Wendy uncovered the concept of ‘mono no aware.’ It’s a Japanese term that translates to ‘beautiful but fleeting,’ an understanding that everything is impermanent and changing. Even, she discovered, a landscape decimated by fire.

Wendy was struck by the beauty of the burn area and the idea that it didn’t necessarily represent an ending, but also a beginning. “Everything is impermanent," she says. “The concept of ‘mono no aware’ helped me understand even better what’s going on in the forest ecosystems. This will transform into something and we just don’t know what it is yet. It’s not all death and destruction.”

To translate her findings into art, Wendy took to her loom. Inspired by the texture of the charred trees that look the same 20 years later, she worked on a lattice-based piece. The growth rings on trees translated into a piece of the same name. In thinking about smoke (“so elusive but powerful,” she notes), she was able to capture aspects of the part of a fire that isn’t visible so many years later.

“I found specific links between what I was seeing and what I was making more than ever before,” Wendy says. “It opened my mind up to new ideas to express.”

Those ideas can now be seen on display in Denver, at Space Gallery (400 Santa Fe Dr.). Wendy’s solo show “Burn Series: Mono No Aware” will be on display through Saturday, Jan. 3. Find more information online at www.spacegallery.org or www.wendykowynia.com.